Claire Fox, Yale University, Summer 2019, NEH
Scaling Software Preservation and Emulation Infrastructure (EaaSI) is a digital preservation initiative hosted by Digital Preservation Services at Yale University Library. Building upon the work of the Emulation as a Service (EaaS) digital preservation model, EaaSI aims to create scalable, sustainable infrastructure that will allow for the use and sharing of emulated software environments across a range of memory institutions. The EaaSI infrastructure will provide institutions with the ability to easily access legacy software-dependent digital objects within their collections that otherwise might remain unseen. The primary objective of my internship at EaaSI was to define a workflow documenting the export of Environment Objects (configured software environments) from the EaaSI software platform and the process of ingesting them as information packages into Preservica, YUL’s Digital Preservation System, for long-term preservation as digital objects. To achieve this end, I wrote a document that defines the necessary components of a system-agnostic Environment Object preservation package, along with a workflow that describes an Environment Object ingest process specific to Preservica. The creation of these documents required me to hold regular meetings with various EaaSI and Digital Preservation Services teammates, and challenged me to imagine the long-term needs of a pioneering digital preservation initiative. Over the course of this internship, I also had the opportunity to participate in object-specific EaaSI use cases, to execute software configuration tasks within the EaaSI software platform, and to meet a number of inspiring archivists working across the Yale community.
Claire Fox interned at Yale University in Summer 2019.
